Things are looking up! (Or you’re not looking!)
Keeping track of all the changes in summer 2020 is like trying to thread a needle on a roller coaster!
Remember 2016? The epidemic then was the fear that we would normalize Trump. That his intolerance and vulgarity would infect us all and become our new normal. Remember?
Well look at us now! The only thing that has been normalized is our intolerance for the toleration we have shown for what should always have been intolerable! Under Trump’s tutelage, the former locked room of acceptable political conversation — what could be on the electoral table and what not — has been completely overturned!
Coronavirus, like some unkindly act from a friendly god, came down and — with all of the tragedy and death — decided to give a final exam to 40 years of Republican mis-rule everywhere and all at once. We the People took that test and have graded the GOP a clear “F.”
To refresh our memories: It all began with Ronald Reagan. It was he who got Americans, as in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” to chant, “Big government bad, small government better.” And over the decades, his direct descendants have further altered it, until Trump came along and got all the critters chanting: “Small government bad, no government better!”
And that is exactly what we got and are getting during this pandemic. No government. Trump’s refusal to put the federal government at the center of managing the worst public health crisis in a hundred years is not Trump being Trump. It is Trump being a mainstream conservative in the GOP mold.
All the GOP has vilified for 40 years — a well-funded and efficient government that serves everyone — proved to be the most essential service we need during this health crisis. Their old mantras of “Leave it to the states, state rights,” that so many accepted over the last four decades, has proven DANGEROUS TO YOUR PERSONAL HEALTH AND THE NATION’S!
All the GOP has said was good — culture wars over Christmas, “God, guns and gays,” tax cuts for the rich in trade for all the guns you can buy — has proven to be utterly irrelevant to the country, the world and the reality we now find ourselves in.
Utterly irrelevant? Yes, when not actually dangerous to your health.
And right after we all took that final exam, the original sin of America — virulent racism — was dropped on us with the live, slow motion lynching of George Floyd.
And how did we respond to that? By breaking out of 40 years of GOP racialized politics and creating the largest mass movement in our history. Black Lives Matter is now more popular among white folk than Martin Luther King Jr. was on the day he died! Not only are statues of our white supremacist past coming down — in England, they replaced one of an old slaver with a statue of a BLM activist! You know that will be here next.
Millions took part in protests against police brutality — from the biggest mixed-race cities to the whitest of white bread suburbs! And when police responded with violence, we did not go home, we double-downed, and now towns and cities across America are debating shifting massive resources into community public safety programs, which rely on social services and not law enforcement. Traffic stops are being taken away form police and given to traffic wardens to reduce racial profiling. We are rethinking not just how we police, but if we need that kind of policing at all!
Cities and towns are declaring racism a public health menace!
Having rejected 40 years of GOP mis-rule, America is now ready to join with civilized nations that do not respond to mental illness with police and guns. Not much of a step if you are European or Canadian, but a huge improvement for us.
And that is not even all of it!
The eruption after Floyd’s murder also underscored the split between young and old over such essential issues as our understanding of “freedom of speech” after the now-famous “Harper’s Letter” from over 100 luminaries bemoaning the so-called “cancel culture’s” war on free speech. (See: harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate) But really it is a generational shift regarding the meaning of free speech — and who has the ability to exercise that right in the public forum.
But we are still not done!
The economic crisis that came with corona has completely retooled our notions of valued work and how it is compensated. Those we rarely thought of because of their low “social status” — cashiers, truck drivers, restaurant workers, Walmart employees — are now seen wide and far as essential to our survival. Who in Congress will oppose a $15 federal minimum wage when pictures of all those essentials are posted? Or universal child care for them?
And finally, the confluence of the pandemic, BLM and Trump’s utter incompetence has even allowed questioning capitalism to become mainstream! The policies of progressive social democracies in Europe, rather than disdained as “effin Europeans,” have now become mainstream. Bernie Sanders may have introduced them in 2016, but corona and Trump have injected democratic socialism much further into the mainstream.
We are on a roller coaster, but if you look up, even while speeding downhill, the panorama is a beautiful sight to see.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Easthampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net.